Recently, I found myself spending a lot of time with a spreadsheet.
The spreadsheet was doing exactly what spreadsheets are supposed to do: displaying numbers.
Scores.
Percentages.
Totals.
The numbers were clear enough.
What surprised me was how quickly I became less interested in the numbers themselves and more interested in the stories behind them.
Because the number usually isn’t the whole story.
A missed target tells you something happened.
A recurring mistake tells you something happened.
A low score tells you something happened.
But none of those things explain why.
The number is real. The result matters. But it is often the final chapter of a story that started much earlier.
I think this is one of the reasons I’ve always been more drawn to development than evaluation.
Evaluation answers the question:
“What happened?”
Development asks:
“What’s creating what happened?”
Both questions matter.
But they lead you to different places.
A recurring error might look like a performance problem until you discover it’s actually a training gap.
A missed goal might appear to be a motivation issue until you realize the process itself is creating friction.
Sometimes what looks like carelessness is confusion.
Sometimes what looks like resistance is uncertainty.
Sometimes what looks like a pattern is actually a single difficult week.
The outcome hasn’t changed.
But the understanding has.
I’ve realized that understanding isn’t the opposite of judgment.
Judgment is easy.
The target was met or it wasn’t.
The mistake happened or it didn’t.
The score exists.
Understanding simply helps keep judgment in proportion.
Without context, it’s easy to assume we know what we’re looking at.
With context, we have a better chance of responding to the actual issue instead of the most visible symptom.
I think this matters in leadership, too.
People aren’t spreadsheets.
But it’s surprisingly easy to treat outcomes as if they tell the entire story.
Someone seems disengaged.
Someone struggles with a new responsibility.
Someone falls short of expectations.
The outcome is visible.
The reason often isn’t.
Strong leadership still requires accountability. Expectations still matter. Results still matter.
But I’ve found that curiosity tends to produce better answers than assumptions.
Not because curiosity lowers the bar.
Because it helps you understand where the bar is actually being missed.
The dashboard I was building eventually became less about tracking numbers and more about finding patterns.
What keeps showing up?
What seems connected?
What story might these results be trying to tell?
The numbers were useful.
But the understanding was where the value lived.
Maybe that’s true in more places than spreadsheets.
Maybe some of the most important things in our lives aren’t hidden from us.
Maybe they’re simply waiting underneath the first thing we notice.
And sometimes the story behind the number is the part worth paying attention to.
Side Note
A number can tell you what happened. Curiosity is often what tells you what to do next.
